Paper short abstract:

What are the legal and political effects of official lies about what occurred in cases of police violence? To answer this question, the paper examines the South African police leadership's role in shaping evidence about the 2012 Marikana Massacre.

Paper long abstract:

What are the legal and political effects of official lies about what occurred in cases of police violence? To answer this question, the paper examines the South African police leadership's role in producing evidence that would be available (or not) for a Commission of Inquiry about the 2012 Marikana Massacre, an event where police officers killed 34 striking mine workers and injured dozens more. The paper looks at a contradictory situation where an official Commission of Inquiry produced thousands of pages of evidence and testimony about the event, and yet still found it difficult to assign blame for the violence because officers gave conflicting testimony of the events that transpired and senior police officials allegedly altered or manufactured evidence following the massacre. The result has been no prosecutions of police officers for the events of that day and answers to a variety of legal questions about the nature of the event remain outstanding, including most importantly whether any of the police violence was illegal. Similarly, there has been little political accountability for politicians connected to the events at Marikana. The paper uses this seemingly extreme case to think through the challenges in producing "the truth" about incidents of quotidian police violence in many contexts across the African continent.